Pictures of Angkor Wat

This post has nothing to do with spam, malware or security. Instead, you can file this under It’s-my-blog-and-I’ll-post-what-I-want-to.

Anyhow, the past couple of weeks I was in Cambodia and Bali (Indonesia). It’s been my life long dream (for the past 18 months – every time I achieve one life long dream, I acquire a new one; previous ones include swimming in the Great Barrier Reef, visiting the Great Wall of China and the ruins of Macchu Picchu) to visit the temples of Angkor Wat, built by the Khmer empire in the 12th century AD.

Below are some pictures for your random enjoyment along with some commentary.

This is one of the first temples we visited; in one of the Tomb Raider movies (forget which one), they filmed some scenes here.

This is outside another set of ruins within the temple complex not far from the picture above. It was very hot that day, at least +36 degrees C. I ended up getting blisters on my feet.

If you look at these carvings, starting from the bottom and moving upwards, you see a monkey, a snake, and a stegosaurus (huh?).

Another temple structure. Along the way we passed two very large temple structures (not pictured in this post) and during the past few years, two tourists have fallen off of them and died. Surprisingly, neither of them were American.

Those little dots on the side of the columns are bullet holes left by the Khmer Rouge as they were retreating during the late 1970’s (Cambodia was invaded by Vietnam in 1978 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge, and the ensuing military conflict lasted until 1979). The Khmer Rouge didn’t formally disband until two decades later, and even today none of the leaders have ever been charged with war crimes. It took a decade for the country of Cambodia and the UN to agree on a format on how to charge the leaders of the regime (many of whom are already dead).

Technically, the previous temples above were not Angkor Wat itself. Angkor Wat is the central temple that was used for religious purposes. This picture is Angkor Wat proper.

And of course, here is me doing my signature pose in front of an ancient set of ruins. This is kind of my thing, I have similar pictures of me doing this at Macchu Picchu (ancient Inca ruins), Tikal (ancient Mayan ruins), on a mountain in New Zealand, and now here.